Atlantic African, American, and European Backgrounds to Contact, Commerce, and Enslavement 7postcolonial era.^34 Rodney’s positions came into question
in large part because, as Walter C. Rucker notes, “while
it is quite true that European imperial domination of the
continent indeed contorted its features and disrupted its
outlines, down-streaming that specifi cally modern reality
back to the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries
might be to project too much European power and control
back through time.”^35 In eff ect, though Rodney and others
revised early scholarship on the slave trade, they did so at
the cost of presenting Europeans as the ultimate actors and
agents of historical change in Africa.
New work in the fi eld has off ered yet another revision,
focusing increasingly on the active role that Africans them-
selves played in the development of the transatlantic slaving
system. Of these John Th ornton’s thesis is perhaps the most
controversial. Th ornton, writing in Africa and Africans in
the Making of the Atlantic World, argues that Europeans did
not posses either the military nor the political power neces-
sary to force Africans to sell slaves against their will; and
further, severe competition among various European pow-
ers on the west coast of Africa meant that no one power
was able to aff ect a monopoly over trade that would have
enabled them to dictate the terms of trade. Instead, Th orn-
ton argues that Africans, as shrewdly demanding traders,
were the prime negotiators of the terms of trade. As such,
Th ornton contends that African participation in the slave
trade was voluntary.^36
Indeed, this revisionist stance along with a downward
re-estimation of the numbers of Africans enslaved during
the transatlantic slavery have been read by some critics as
an attempt to palliate European crimes against humanity
in the past and, by implication, to minimize more recent
economic and political injustices along with present-day
inequalities and violence. Surely, this is not Th ornton’s aim,
though he does seem to discount the role that European
powers played in the development of the transatlantic slave
trade. Perhaps more important, however, Th ornton’s sug-
gestion that African participation in the slave trade was
voluntary eff ectively reduces human action to the level of
individual conscious volition. As Robin Law suggests in a
review of Th ornton’s thesis, “although individual actions
may be ‘free,’ the overall outcome corresponds to nobody’s
conscious intention, but refl ects the internal logic of the
economic system: in this sense rather than Europeans im-
posing their will upon Africans, both European purchas-
ers and African sellers of slaves might be seen as subjectWhile British North American colonial law paved
the way for the establishment of slavery, the intensity
of the slave trade that supplied the burgeoning colonies
with labor increased dramatically on the western coast
of Africa. European traders—no longer capable of seiz-
ing through kidnap enough Africans to satisfy colonial
demand for labor—established posts along the coast of
Africa and relied on African coastal traders along with
royal authorities to capture and transport captives from
the interior regions. In this way, African trade networks,
which had previously been oriented eastward, toward the
Saharan trade, became increasingly focused on the west-
ern trade, supplying European traders with African labor-
ers. Th e extent to which the presence of European traders
on the West Coast of Africa aff ected African cultures and
societies has been a matter of intense historical debate for
decades. Th ese debates have been so crucial for several
reasons, not the least of which results from the fact that
discussions about slavery and the slave trade oft en occur
in the midst of contemporary debates concerning racial
justice, colonialism, and, perhaps most important, histori-
cal culpability.
Many of the early interpretations of the slave trade
regarded it as an essential good for the societies of West
and West-Central Africa, contending, among other things,
that the slave trade spurred economic development for the
societies involved. J. D. Fage argued, “there seems in fact
to be a close correlation in West Africa between economic
development... and the growth of the institution of slav-
ery... in West Africa.”^32 Early scholars implied that Africans
required something like a centuries-long transatlantic slave
trade before their labor and economy could be made pro-
ductive. As one scholar noted, “to see enslavement as the
precondition of the growth of states is étatiste and elitist in
the extreme.”^33
A revision of these interpretations occurred in the
midst of anticolonial movements throughout Africa and
Latin America, along with the Civil Rights movement in
the United States. Perhaps most infl uential in this scholar-
ship was the work of Walter Rodney who argued that the
Atlantic slave trade, rather than serving a positive good
for the African societies involved, was actually detrimen-
tal to West and West-Central Africa. Moreover, Rodney
argued that the transatlantic slave trade contributed much
to the more contemporary economic, political, and social
malaise aff ecting much of the African continent in the